ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter was written partly in response to a newspaper article (Ferrari, 2014) in The Australian newspaper, which outlined the intention of the Australian government to diagnose the current ills and prescribe a course of correc - tive medicine to ensure the future health of teacher education – to use one of the medical metaphors beloved by contemporary policymakers and politicians in relation to education. In subsequent chapters, our goal has been to loosen the grip of such instrumental thinking about teacher education, so pervasive in media and policy discussions, by promoting conversation, contemplation and critique. However, the space of thought offers no guarantees; indeed, as the forms of theorising in which we have engaged illustrate, thinking has the capacity to be critical as well as creative while any construction requires a measure of destruction. Although the phantoms of modernity – certainty, systematicity and amnesia – may be unsettled by the creative-destructive power of negative thinking they continue to haunt.
